...and people are stupid

27 comments:

Excellent article (though I think your headline sums up your own article all too well). I do think some US politicians may care about the Iraqis, but all of them are too much politicians not to recognize that at least large portions of the population of the US are insular, parochial (huge as it is), hypernationalistic. It's a frustration to those of us who have some inkling that the US is not the be-all and end-all of humanity. Really we should make travel abroad compulsory; too many people I speak to seem rather unaware of the larger world, and to have an ingrained belief that people who don't speak English must be less intelligent than they are.

what's up with your RSS feed? It's currently spewing a seemingly random list of posts from your archives at the moment, so I get terribly confused about what's new and old. If you know the appropriate place to hit it with a large hammer, please do so.

Billy: The wonders of blogging. If I think of a good line after a post, I can put it in the comments. The whole notion of esprit d'escalier becomes redundant.

And talking of retrospective additions, sorry about the RSS/labels thing, Chris & P. Think of it as the equivalent of Marathon rebranding to Snickers. It raises my profile, but 50% of the people who now notice me want to punch me.

billy: we have to teach the man to read first. as it is he has to learn his speeches phonetically, like Puffi Amiyumi.hey tim-m feel anything this morning in your neck of the woods? stay away from the damn beach!

Annie, surely he doesn't claim that he *should* be doing difficult or dangerous jobs instead though, which is kind of the point of the original post I thought. unless the original piece isn't actually about anything (as it comes across), in which case I'll disregard it totally.

Hey, look who's taken advantage of the time difference. Hello Norm, and Dave A and Nick C and all your little Eustonite chums, all of whom have doubtless joined up to fight the infidel without us looking, copies of Ferguson's Empire clenched proudly between their buttcheeks.

Look, I just wrote a cogent argument for the coalition staying in Iraq, which surely means I think things can get better. That practically makes me a neocon. Roll over Don Rumsfeld and tell Chris Hitchens the news.

And the whole Normblog article is based on tu quoque, ad hominem, morituri te salutant, fetuccini primavera and any other slab of Latin cliche you can scrabble up. Which doesn't, incidentally, mean that you're more clever than Annie; just that you read Asterix when you were a kid. Woopy doo.

Annie, I apologise on behalf of this gatecrasher. Shall I block anonymous comments, do you reckon?

Not quite sure whether Will and Anonymous are the same person, or just crouching under the same virtual rock.

But anyway. The coup was illegal, in that it contravened the constitution, but that was dead anyway. Thaksin, the previous PM, managed to make a complete laughing stock of it, completely blurring the line between his business and political personae. His 'democratic mandate' was based on industrial-scale vote buying, which all his opponents endeavoured and failed to match. As far as 'legality' and 'democracy' goes, the coup was a matter of rearranging deckchairs.

One legacy that Thaksin has given Thailand, thanks to his dodgy dealings in Singapore and Burma, is a heightened sense of xenophobia, which was recently given substance by the tightening of the foreign ownership and residency laws. Right now, any non-Thai who starts telling the locals about what's good for them is probably going to make matters much worse.

Will – ooooOOOoooo! (as I believe it is written.) No, I’m not very bright – I didn’t know, for example, that knowing Latin phrases is a measure of intelligence, so thanks for clearing that up. And I didn’t understand why Tim’s job undermines his argument, though Lord Norm’s job does not undermine his argument.

Don’t block the comments Tim – they are v entertaining, these CiF-ers, though they do get their knickers in a twist. We’re all much too nice and agreeable…

what am I like?

Author of books about Radiohead, Leonard Cohen and The Noughties, plus various odds and sods for The Guardian, Mojo, Time Out, Prospect, BBC, CNN and more. Finally doing an MA. You can reach me at timfootman (AT) gmail.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste

So what’s all this Cultural Snow business, then?

“The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It’s even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact.”“What do you mean?”“I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restaurants in one day, you eat one bite of each dish and leave the rest untouched. You think that makes sense?”“But you couldn’t very well eat everything, could you?”“Of course not. I’d drop dead in three days if I did. And everyone would think I was an idiot. I’d get no sympathy whatsoever.”“So what choice have you got?” she said.“I don't know. The way I see it, it’s like shoveling snow. You do it because somebody’s got to, not because it's fun.”“Shoveling snow, huh?” she mused.“Well, you know, cultural snow,” I said.—from Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)